This week I read a tweet by Lindsay Kaplan (no relation) sharing that she is pessimistic that her child is going to learn anything during the 2020-2021 remote school year and asking for a real conversation on what we do about students who are going to fall behind because of the pandemic. She’s right. We need to have this conversation.
The pandemic has created an unprecedented learning environment for basically every student in the world. And it’s suboptimal. The harsh reality is that most students are going to fall behind. And those students without access to the internet or devices are going to fall further behind enhancing the divide between the socioeconomic classes.
Researchers believe the spring closures from the pandemic resulted in students retaining only 70 percent of their annual reading gains, compared with a normal year, and teachers reported that students engage in remote learning only about 60% of the time. Overall, students reported that their spring remote learning wasn’t as good as their in-classroom experiences, but students can’t go back to the classroom, because even 2nd graders are getting COVID now.
The interesting thing about this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ve never had to figure out how to come back from behind in mass like this before. EdTech leaders have always been talking about how to better help ESL students get to reading level, and how to support students with learning disabilities stay at grade level, but never have we had to figure out how to advance an entire generation of students who have fallen behind. And to be frank: this is an opportunity for the edtech product community and most of the opportunities I see are at the intersection of edtech and media.
So what will these products look like and how do we get them started? Here are my predictions:
Flashcards are one of the most historic educational tools students use to learn a subject they don’t know. Quizlet took this tool a step further and built a business with over 50 million active flashcard users. For comparison, there are 55 million students in America. But what’s next? In order for there to be mass adoption of flashcards beyond what we have already seen, a content company needs to come out with digital flashcards built against The Common Core Standards and gamify the sh-- out of it. I’m talking about students who use the cards getting entered to win big prizes. Like entering the lottery. And those winners need to be celebrated and publicized in a way students of all household incomes are able to follow...just like how all kids in Willy Wonky and the Chocolate Factory craved to win one of the five golden tickets. The opportunity here is for a content company, for the product the allows students compete, and in the sponsorship of the prizes. To get started I think it actually has to be a company that already has one of the largest footprints in the classroom. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Microsoft sponsored flashcards by the end of the year.
Because access to the internet has been one of the biggest barriers to remote learning, I’ve become obsessed with the idea of putting school on TV. While I can see Disney+ starting to broadcast programs starring school subjects, I think there is a bigger opportunity for a curriculum partner to contract out to big three television networks. The question is, who has the production value? While Masterclass is great, it’s sweet spot isn’t K-12 subjects. What I think could work, is a company like Outlier or a competitor producing television ready content in K-12 common core subjects.
Since remote learning has proven to be less effective and less engaging than in-classroom learning, I believe parents are going to be paranoid if their children are tracking at grade level this year. Standardized testing has previously been a contentious topic, with most parties feeling that students in public schools are tested too much, but I predict there is a big opportunity for a direct-to-consumer assessment product that tests if students are tracking at grade level. Assessment tools haven’t been marketed directly to parents before, and I think there is an opportunity for a brand new product to be launched here.
In summary, there currently aren’t many products built to bring the masses back from behind. Thus, I believe there will be a new generation of products (venture back-able products because they will have the addressable market of everyone) and new public/private partnerships launching soon to address the gap in knowledge that will be created this school year.